When I was a child, my father used to tell me stories about life on my grandfather's farm. The plot of land wasn't very large. It sits at the bottom of a hill so rainwater could be problematic. The soil was unforgiving and required a lot of effort to get things to grow. He lived a hard life—he and his entire family worked their fingers raw every year to produce a crop. As a child, my father tended to my grandfather's livestock; he did so even at night in cold weather. "Back then," he told me, "the night sky was pitch black. People could see so many stars. Even the smallest sliver of the moon was enough to cast a shadow." My father told me how he learned to navigate at night using only the stars to guide him. He learned to use a sextant; he joked couldn't steer a ship, but at least he would know where he was drifting. Those stories took on new meaning when, at 18, I left home for Parris Island. The skies above the Marine Corps Recruit Depot weren't as dark as they would've been in Portugal, but they were considerably darker than the skies over the D.C. suburbs. A few weeks before I left, we saw the moon low in the early evening sky. He motioned toward it. "The bright cities man built has made it impossible to see the night sky I saw as a child." We sat in silence for a moment. "At least," he continued, "man has been unable to outshine the moon. The night sky might look different but for all of human history, the moon has looked the same. The Egyptians, Arabs, Romans, and Israelites—everyone and everything that has ever lived on this earth—bore witness to the same moon. You think it will not happen now, but while you are down there, if you should miss your home, look up and find the moon and take comfort that I can see it too."
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#nikon; #nikonD90; #moon; #moonlight; #nightshot; #nightshots; #nightphotography; #thewholeofthemoon; #isawthecrescent; #igdc; #alexandriaVA; #immigrants

All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy,
Beg, borrow or steal
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
#eclipse#darksideofthemoon#pinkfloyd#moon#fullmoon#eclipseofthemoon#thewholeofthemoon#u2thejoshuatree2017#u2#exit